The story of young engineers who resurrected an engine nearly twice their age.

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There has never been anything like the Saturn V, the launch vehicle that powered the United States past the Soviet Union to a series of manned lunar landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The rocket redefined "massive," standing 363 feet (110 meters) in height and producing a ludicrous 7.68 million pounds (34 meganewtons) of thrust from the five monstrous, kerosene-gulping Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engines that made up its first stage.

At the time, the F-1 was the largest and most powerful liquid-fueled engine ever constructed; even today, its design remains unmatched (though see the sidebar, "The Soviets," for more information on engines that have rivaled the F-1). The power generated by five of these engines was best conceptualized by author David Woods in his book How Apollo Flew to the Moon—"[T]he power output of the Saturn first stage was 60 gigawatts. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom."

Despite the stunning success of the Saturn V, NASA's direction shifted after Project Apollo's conclusion; the Space Transport System—the Space Shuttle and its associated hardware—was instead designed with wildly different engines. For thirty years, NASA's astronaut corps rode into orbit aboard Space Shuttles powered by RS-25 liquid hydrogen-powered engines and solid-propellant boosters. With the Shuttle's discontinuation, NASA is currently hitching space rides with the Russians.

But there's a chance that in the near future, a giant rocket powered by updated F-1 engines might once again thunder into the sky. And it's due in no small part to a group of young and talented NASA engineers in Huntsville, Alabama, who wanted to learn from the past by taking priceless museum relics apart... and setting them on fire.

Enlarge/ An F-1 engine on display at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Author's wife at right for scale.

Lee Hutchinson

Enter our young rocket scientists

Tom Williams is the kind of boss you want to have. He's smart, of course—that's a prerequisite for his job as the director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's (MSFC) Propulsion Systems Department. But he doesn't mind stepping back and giving his team interesting challenges and then turning them loose to work out the details. Case in point: NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), intended to be an enormous heavy-lift system that will rival the Saturn V in size and capabilities. In thinking about propulsion for the SLS, NASA for the first time in thirty years is considering something other than solid rocket boosters.

The decision to use a pair of solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle instead of liquid-fueled engines like the F-1 had been partly technical and partly political. Solid fuels are hugely energy dense and provide an excellent kick to get a spacecraft moving off of the ground; also, selecting solid fuel boosters allowed the government to send some available contracting dollars to companies involved with building intercontinental ballistic missiles, leveraging that expertise and providing those companies with additional work.

The Soviets

The closest thing the Saturn V had to a contemporary was the Soviet N1, which launched four times and exploded each time, almost always because of failures in the complex system that managed the N1's 30 individual first-stage rocket motors. In contrast, the Saturn V has an unblemished string of successful launches, never suffering a problem or failure significant enough to trigger an abort.

Though the F-1 was the largest and most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever successfully flown, its power was exceeded by a pair of Soviet designs. The RD-170 engine (used for the only two launches of the Energia rocket) and its RD-171 variant (used on the Zenit rocket) both produce more thrust, but the Soviets were unable to overcome problems with combustion instability in a large rocket's nozzle. Combustion instability is the tendency of the burning propellent to swirl as it is pumped into the nozzle; as we'll see, NASA eventually developed a series of baffles on the F-1's injector plate to damp its instability. The Soviet Union chose to work around the problem by fitting the RD-170 with four separate nozzles instead of one large one, giving the RD-170 and -171 the visual appearance of being four separate engines.

This workaround came to be not because the Soviets were lesser engineers or scientists—the Soviet space program was filled with brilliant, talented people—but instead because for most of its existence the Soviet space program's various rocket design bureaus were caught in a push-pull war of direction and leadership between two chief designers: Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko. Korolev favored cryogenically fueled rockets, and Glushko favored those powered by hypergolic propellants. This split in rocket strategy sapped resources, preventing the full force of Soviet engineering talent from focusing on either and ultimately stunting their rocketry program.

For more information on the clashes between Korolev and Glushko, see Asif Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo (also available in twoparts from various places). It is the definitive work on the history of the fascinating and curiously fragmented Soviet space program.

But solid boosters have several downsides, including an inability to stop combustion. Without pumps to switch off or valves to close, solid boosters work a lot like the "morning glory" sparklers my dad used to buy on the Fourth of July—once lit, they burn until they're done. Solid rocket booster design decisions, specifically in regard to containing combustion, contributed to the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger and the death of its crew (though Challenger's destruction was more a failure of NASA management than of technology).

Still, as the Space Shuttle program drew to a close and potentialsuccessors came and went, the inertia of solid boosters and the facilities and people that produced them ensured that they remained a part of the plans.

SLS gave NASA the chance to do a total rethink. As design studies got underway, Williams realized it might be a good idea to re-familiarize the MSFC Propulsion Systems Department with huge kerosene gas generator engines like the F-1 (referred to in shorthand as "LOX/RP-1" or just "LOX/RP" engines, after their oxidizer and fuel mixture of liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene). Scale aside, the F-1 is conceptually a relatively simple design, and that simplicity could translate into cost reduction. Reducing cost for space access is a key priority—perhaps even the overriding priority—outside of safety.

There was a problem, though. SLS' design parameters called for a Saturn V-scale vehicle, capable of lifting 150 metric tons into low Earth orbit. No one working at MSFC had any real experience with gigantic LOX/RP-1 engines; nothing in the world-wide inventory of launch vehicles still operates at that scale today. So how do you make yourself an expert in tech no one fully understands?

Nick Case and Erin Betts, two liquid engine systems engineers working for Williams, found a way. Although no launch vehicles that used F-1 engines are still around, actual F-1s do exist. Fifteen examples sit attached to the three Saturn V stacks on display at NASA facilities, including MSFC; dozens more are scattered around the country on display or in storage. Williams' team inspected the available engines and soon found their target: a flight-ready F-1 which had been swapped out from the launch vehicle destined for the to-be-canceled Apollo 19 mission and instead held in storage for decades. It was in excellent condition.

Case and Betts spearheaded the paperwork-intensive effort to requisition the F-1 from storage and get it into their workshop. They were aided by R.H. Coates, a more senior member of Williams' team and lead propulsion engineer for the SLS Advanced Development Office. Williams offered encouragement and assistance from the management side, but the team was otherwise given free rein on how to proceed. After some study, they came to Williams with a request that was pure engineer: "Why don't we just go ahead and take this thing apart and see what makes it work?"

Williams said yes. "It allowed some of our young engineers to get some hands-on experience with the hardware," he told me, "what we would term the 'dirty hands' approach to learning, just like you did when you took apart your bicycle when you were a kid, or your dad's lawnmower or his radio. One of the best ways to learn as an engineer, or in anything, is to take it apart, study it, ask questions."

And then, hopefully, build a better one.

The plans! The plans!

The F-1 teardown started in relatively low-key fashion. As the team dug into the engine, it became obvious that the internal components were in good shape. In fact, though there was some evidence of rainwater damage, the engine overall was in great shape.

The team initially wanted to build an accurate computer model of every component in the engine so that its behavior could be modeled and simulated, but another goal soon began to take shape: maybe, just maybe, they could mount some of the engine components on a test stand and make the F-1 speak again after 40 years.

Why was NASA working with ancient engines instead of building a new F-1 or a full Saturn V? One urban legend holds that key "plans" or "blueprints" were disposed of long ago through carelessness or bureaucratic oversight. Nothing could be further from the truth; every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so.

A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids. Such a document simply cannot tell the entire story of the hardware. Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was "good enough."

Further, although the principles behind the F-1 are well known, some aspects of its operation simply weren't fully understood at the time. The thrust instability problem is a perfect example. As the F-1 was being built, early examples tended to explode on the test stand. Repeated testing revealed that the problem was caused by the burning plume of propellent rotating as it combusted in the nozzle. These rotations would increase in speed until they were happening thousands of times per second, causing violent oscillations in the thrust that eventually blew the engine apart. The problem could have derailed the Saturn program and jeopardized President Kennedy's Moon landing deadline, but engineers eventually used a set of stubby barriers (baffles) sticking up from the big hole-riddled plate that sprayed fuel and liquid oxygen into the combustion chamber (the "injector plate"). These baffles damped down the oscillation to acceptable levels, but no one knew if the exact layout was optimal.

Enlarge/ Detail on an F-1 engine injector plate at the forward end of the nozzle. Fuel and liquid oxygen are sprayed out of these holes under tremendous pressure, with each ring alternating propellant and oxidizer. Photo is from F-1 engine number F-6045, on public display at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.

Lee Hutchinson

The baffle arrangement "was just a trial and error thing," explained Senior Propulsion Engineer R.H. Coates. "But we'd like to model that and say, well, what if you took one of those baffles out?" Because the baffles are mounted directly to the injector plate, they take up surface area that would otherwise be occupied by more injector holes spraying more fuel and oxidizer; therefore, they rob the engine of power. "So if you want to up the performance on this thing, we can evaluate that with modern analytical techniques and see what that does to your combustion stability."

But before any "hot-fire" testing could occur, the team had to take the very physically real F-1 engine and somehow model it. It's easy—well, relatively easy—to turn a set of CAD files into a real product. Turning a real product into a set of CAD files, though, requires a bit of ingenuity, especially when that product is a gigantic rocket engine.

To tackle the task, NASA brought in a company called Shape Fidelity, which specializes in a technique called "structured light scanning." If you don't have access to the laser from TRON, structured light scanning is just about the next best way to cram something inside of a computer.

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Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com

201 Reader Comments

Awesome article. I hope this design wins over the solid fuel boosters, but I wouldn't count on superior technology overcoming the political inertia of ATK. It's bad enough the STS has to use the SME for the first stage (should be using the RS-68 like Orion was going to) but having solid boosters yet again would just be stupid.

Urban legend or not the "NASA lost the blueprints for Saturn V/Apollo" story still grimy amuses me, as do the excuses about the non computerised plans.

Back when I went to school we were taught that the purpose of technical drawing (and we only used pen, paper and various rulers etc not computers back then) was to allow any engineer to be able to create a workable, finished product from the plans.

Such plans and documentation have worked just fine ever since the industrial revolution got underway. NASA seems to be the only entity in existance incapable of getting this simple principle to work.

Sure, you could make another F-1 accurate to the micrometer using the existing plans. But none of the tooling and experience for that kind of work exists any more, and recreating all of that enabling knowledge and tooling just to make a carbon copy of an Apollo-era F-1 is less than fruitless. If you want to make a modern F-1, the best way to do it is to figure out how the old ones worked, and then make a new and better one, designed with new technology and knowledge, and designed to be built using new and more efficient manufacturing techniques.

I remember watching a documentary of how some engines of the Soviet lunar rocket were hidden after the order was given to destroy them all, and 30 years later they were used as a basis for the modern variant of the RD engine that found its way to Locked Martin.

This is exactly the sort of post I come to Ars for. Articles like this are fantastic. It's a view into a whole world I knew nothing about. I'm nowhere near smart enough to work at a place like NASA, but I love knowing what they're doing and how they're progressing. Thanks for the article.

Brilliant article and a great reminder of the level of engineering required to do it all in the first place.

Yes, but also a great reminder what craftsman could do, look at the welding and it never failed apparently, all done by hand by people who definitely were not rocket scientists. Try to find that today.

Urban legend or not the "NASA lost the blueprints for Saturn V/Apollo" story still grimy amuses me, as do the excuses about the non computerised plans.

Back when I went to school we were taught that the purpose of technical drawing (and we only used pen, paper and various rulers etc not computers back then) was to allow any engineer to be able to create a workable, finished product from the plans.

Such plans and documentation have worked just fine ever since the industrial revolution got underway. NASA seems to be the only entity in existance incapable of getting this simple principle to work.

Sure, you could make another F-1 accurate to the micrometer using the existing plans. But none of the tooling and experience for that kind of work exists any more, and recreating all of that enabling knowledge and tooling just to make a carbon copy of an Apollo-era F-1 is less than fruitless. If you want to make a modern F-1, the best way to do it is to figure out how the old ones worked, and then make a new and better one, designed with new technology and knowledge, and designed to be built using new and more efficient manufacturing techniques.

I'm sure the tooling was industry standard back then and could be recreated if required, same for the skills. Of course that will be labor intesive if you followed the blueprints exactly, but its pretty trivial put put a modern bolt in place of an old one and you would only build parts with lots of welds once as a template for a cast replacement.

The real reason imo for all this effort is because only Werner Von Braun really knew how the engines worked and he's dead now.

Consider the welds on the Mt. Palomar telescope -- an astronomer gave me the chance decades ago and pointed out how carefully it was put together. Smooth, beautiful, full depth welds on steel several inches thick.

One thing, they keep mentioning about the welds, and the lack thereof in the new design...are they sure the welds didn't provide a 'managed' weakness point? I.e. did the welding allow parts of the engine to give slightly, which a solid part would not (possibly catastrophically!)

One thing, they keep mentioning about the welds, and the lack thereof in the new design...are they sure the welds didn't provide a 'managed' weakness point? I.e. did the welding allow parts of the engine to give slightly, which a solid part would not (possibly catastrophically!)

I would doubt that. The old chestnut used in the aerospace industry (although it really applies anywhere) is "Simplicate, and add lightness." With any critical system, fewer parts is always better than more parts, so if design and manufacturing processes allow multiple functions to be combined into a single piece it's generally beneficial to do so.

There are cases where it's desirable to 'manage weakness' as you say, but welds are not the place to do that. More likely it is done at serviceable points that use fasteners and/or sacrificial parts that can be replaced. When welds fatigue it is costly to inspect them properly and the underlying material may be altered or corroded such that additional welds won't work in the future.

I suspect they welded parts here because it was the optimal way to assemble things using the technology available, but if future designs can eliminate some of the welds that would be desirable.

Should Nasa produce blueprints & CAD diagrams of the engine, where does copyright sit?

Is it dated from engine inception (bwaaam bwaaaaam), from the analysis point, from the breakdown point, or is it a brand new copyright when (if?) they publish.Is it all go baby go, or do pratt-whitney, rocketdyne and various skunkworks all have a claim to it.

That said, fantastic article, more than justifys having a subscription., I cant help reading the rocketry articles and seeing those pictures and just wanting to grunt a la tool time, in appreciation.

Should Nasa produce blueprints & CAD diagrams of the engine, where does copyright sit?

Is it dated from engine inception (bwaaam bwaaaaam), from the analysis point, from the breakdown point, or is it a brand new copyright when (if?) they publish.Is it all go baby go, or do pratt-whitney, rocketdyne and various skunkworks all have a claim to it.

That said, fantastic article, more than justifys having a subscription., I cant help reading the rocketry articles and seeing those pictures and just wanting to grunt a la tool time, in appreciation.

IIRC, work done for the government is generally in the public domain, unless deemed state secrets.

I've read before about the Soviet dysfunction in their space program, but I didn't know about it impacting engine design. That was an interesting side bar, so thank you for including it.

One quick question though: their work indicates a renewed push for these boosters. Is this going to be confirmed with some actual design work being built out with manufacturing sectors? I'm a huge fan of private space companies - but at the same time, I think we need to have a government run manned mission program as well. We have a toehold. We shouldn't lose it.

Something I noticed about the pictures of the shuttle main engines in the other article, plus the comments about the baffles taking up space in the injection plate, and the fact that the F1-- is producing the same thrust as the well-tested F-1A..

Well, I noticed that the Shuttle main engines (RS-25) have raised injection nozzles in a similar pattern to the baffles in the F-1.. is that the solution used in F-1A and F-1B as well? It's mentioned as a major engineering point, but if the shuttle engines had it fixed 30 years ago, and the F-1A even longer ago than that, is that really the major engineering challenge in the new engines? Or is it just getting good 'baseline' operational tests to compare a 'modernized' engine?

One question: Do they think they have solved the Pogo effect? (not the cartoon, but an "stutter" in the motion of the launch vehicle that was as if a pogo stick had integrated into the system causing rapid fluctuations in thrust and acceleration). At the end of the Apollo program they still had not solved it.

The team was able to use the structured light scan of that particular bolt and, in less than half a day, to fabricate a tool using an additive manufacturing method called electron beam melting to quickly "print" 3D projects out of metal powder.

Imagine you're a Rocketdyne engineer in the 60's and one day, some guy walks out of a time warp into your assembly area, pulls out some weird looking cameras, takes a few pictures of your engine, plugs some cables into some unknown equipment, and then, looking bored, sits down and directs his attention to a thin metal and glass slab for a while. When a light changes on the unknown equipment, the guy gets up, sticks his hand inside, and pulls out a tool which takes apart your engine.

That would be magic. You'd think the guy was from the 25th century or something. But no, only 45 years.

...just think where we're going to be in another 45 years.

my grandmother died @100. in her lifetime we've gone from the Wright Flyer to Apollo and beyond.

This was a fantastic article about an amazing process. I regret having never made it to Cape Canaveral for a shuttle launch, and hope that someday I can rectify this failing by seeing an F-1B take to the skies. It is positively flabbergasting what a group of brilliant, dedicated people can do wi hard work, long hours and the backing of a nation that still turned its thoughts to the stars.

Great article Lee. I was wondering though, do you have any more information (or sources) on the destructive oscillations that occurred while testing the F-1? A family member of mine specialized in modeling oscillation behavior while at Boeing, including working on the Saturn V in Huntsville, Alabama.

My understanding from that same family member is there were also significant issues with the second stage (J-2 engine) exploding during testing firings as well. The cause for this was slightly different than the F-1. The F-1 was designed to operate at 1 atmosphere of pressure, as it was the first stage engine of the Saturn V. The J-2, on the other-hand, was designed to to fire when the Saturn V was high in the atmosphere where the atmospheric pressure is less than 1% of the pressure on earth. When they attempted to fire the J-2 on earth, the vast difference in the atmospheric pressure between where the J-2 was designed to operate (less than 0.01 atmosphere) and the pressure on earth (1 atmosphere) proved too great and caused the engine to repeatedly explode during initial testings.

Urban legend or not the "NASA lost the blueprints for Saturn V/Apollo" story still grimy amuses me, as do the excuses about the non computerised plans.

Back when I went to school we were taught that the purpose of technical drawing (and we only used pen, paper and various rulers etc not computers back then) was to allow any engineer to be able to create a workable, finished product from the plans.

Such plans and documentation have worked just fine ever since the industrial revolution got underway. NASA seems to be the only entity in existance incapable of getting this simple principle to work.

Sure, you could make another F-1 accurate to the micrometer using the existing plans. But none of the tooling and experience for that kind of work exists any more, and recreating all of that enabling knowledge and tooling just to make a carbon copy of an Apollo-era F-1 is less than fruitless. If you want to make a modern F-1, the best way to do it is to figure out how the old ones worked, and then make a new and better one, designed with new technology and knowledge, and designed to be built using new and more efficient manufacturing techniques.

I'm sure the tooling was industry standard back then and could be recreated if required, same for the skills. Of course that will be labor intesive if you followed the blueprints exactly, but its pretty trivial put put a modern bolt in place of an old one and you would only build parts with lots of welds once as a template for a cast replacement.

The real reason imo for all this effort is because only Werner Von Braun really knew how the engines worked and he's dead now.

I don't think anyone doubts we could use the original F-1s as models if we needed to, but the point is that some more engineering work with modern technology can save a lot of that labor. Reducing the number of welds, the number of parts, etc. saves time and money (and there are fewer failure points!).

The article is fantastic. I really appreciate the detail you provided. I had always thought the same about the popping noises. It is also good to know that there is enough to be learned from the roots of our space age to bring us into the future. The new manufacturing techniques are sure as fascinating to me in their own way as the old handcrafting.

I'm sure the tooling was industry standard back then and could be recreated if required, same for the skills. Of course that will be labor intesive if you followed the blueprints exactly, but its pretty trivial put put a modern bolt in place of an old one and you would only build parts with lots of welds once as a template for a cast replacement.

Doubtful - given how long ago it was, and given the circumstances (the US space programme was unique, required extremely high levels of precision, was produced under strict time constraints and was extremely well-funded), I'd expect that a lot of the tooling was custom made. And while I'm sure people did their best to generate documentation, this often falls by the wayside when it comes to large and complex systems delivered under tight deadlines.

As to the required skillsets: again, I'd guess that a lot of the skills involved in producing these engines have long since become obsolete: manufacturing techniques have moved on considerably since the 1960s. For a similar (if far smaller scale) example, there's been an effort in the UK to build a Tornado steam train from scratch (rather than reusing original parts). The original intent was to source everything in the UK, but the charity ended up having to get the boiler from Germany, where there's still some companies with steam-building experience - and even then, the boiler had to be returned back to Germany for significant repair work.

There's also a few other points to bear in mind. As the article touched on (when discussing the replacements for the various "soft" elements of the engine), both metallurgy and chemistry have changed since those days. For instance, even if a bolt is standard enough to be replaced with a modern equivalent, there's still a lot of factors which need to be considered: is it too rigid, or too flexible? How much does it expand under heat? Is there a risk of any chemical reactions (e.g. galvanic corrosion)? Is it too light - or too heavy?

Similar applies to replacing existing "welded" parts with modern cast parts: aside from the questions above, there's also the fact that stress points in the cast part will be different, which could cause issues. These engines are under almost unimaginable levels of stress, and even relatively minor tweaks could cause a butterfly-effect to ripple through the entire engine with catastrophic results.

I'd also argue that fundamentally, any system as large, complex and high-performance as this cannot be stamped out with a cookie cutter: in many ways, assembling, maintaining and tuning them is more of an art form than an engineering exercise. Much as I'd prefer to avoid a car analogy, there are parallels with F1 car-engine technology: very high performance, very finely tuned and they run at insanely high revs (20,000 rpm). Oh, and the engines need to be rebuilt after just 500 miles.

Finally, do we actually want to be using 1960s technology? As per above, we've come a long way in virtually every aspect, from metallurgy to manufacturing techniques and system modelling. It should be possible to make an engine that's lighter, simpler to manufacture/maintain, cheaper *and* incorporate modern safety and monitoring features that were flatly impossible back in the 1960s.

And that's exactly what's being done, by the sound of it: they're taking the organically-determined lessons of the past and iterating atop them.

Fascinating article, thanks to Ars and Lee (though most of us are jealous of the stuff you got to see while writing this article).

Years ago I had an opportunity to witness a shuttle launch, but the launch was delayed due to bad weather. HUGE disappointment.

As others have pointed out, it is truly amazing to see what engineers designed and built using nothing but pencils and slide-rules, and the amazing craftsmanship that went into the actual fabrication. No doubt most of the processes are lost arts, as with so many other disciplines.

I was wondering why there are no similar grand projects these days. Was the Apollo program ludicrously expensive or something? Then I looked at it and according to NASA in 2009, the whole program "including all research and development costs; the procurement of 15 Saturn V rockets, 16 Command/Service Modules, 12 Lunar Modules, plus program support and management costs; construction expenses for facilities and their upgrading, and costs for flight operations" was $170 billion.

Now compare this to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... $1443 billion since 2001. Money well spent?

I was wondering why there are no similar grand projects these days. Was the Apollo program ludicrously expensive or something? Then I looked at it and according to NASA in 2009, the whole program "including all research and development costs; the procurement of 15 Saturn V rockets, 16 Command/Service Modules, 12 Lunar Modules, plus program support and management costs; construction expenses for facilities and their upgrading, and costs for flight operations" was $170 billion.

Now compare this to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... $1443 billion since 2001. Money well spent?

It was ridiculously expensive. Far more than we have political will today. Remember the Apollo project was a thinly vailed method of testing if we could get the ultimate high ground in a nuclear war.

I was wondering why there are no similar grand projects these days. Was the Apollo program ludicrously expensive or something? Then I looked at it and according to NASA in 2009, the whole program "including all research and development costs; the procurement of 15 Saturn V rockets, 16 Command/Service Modules, 12 Lunar Modules, plus program support and management costs; construction expenses for facilities and their upgrading, and costs for flight operations" was $170 billion.

Now compare this to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... $1443 billion since 2001. Money well spent?

$170 billion in 1968 dollars is over $1 trillion in $2013 dollars. So yes, it was expensive.

I remember watching a documentary of how some engines of the Soviet lunar rocket were hidden after the order was given to destroy them all, and 30 years later they were used as a basis for the modern variant of the RD engine that found its way to Locked Martin.

Yes, the Atlas V uses an engine called the RD-180 on its first stage. The actual stage (tanks, etc.) is built in America. The RD-180 is a half-sized derivative of the RD-170 mentioned in the article (remember the sidebar that talked about how the RD-170 looks like 4 engines? Well the RD-180 look like 2 based on that train of thought).

It was actually designed specifically for the American market after the fall of the Soviet Union allowed such business negotiations between Russian and American companies.

The other engines you are talking about, from that documentary, are NK-33 engines, which were to be used on the Soviet moon rocket, the N-1. They operate on a similar principle as the RD-180/170 engines, but were built over a decade earlier. What I've always found ironic is that this principle, oxidizer-rich staged combustion, was considered by many competent engineers in America to be impossible. Sure we can land a man on the moon, no problem, but ORSC engines, no way. Meanwhile the Russians were happily building them, unaware that they were doing something 'impossible'

Anyway, it was engineers from Aerojet who discovered the engines in the early 1990's and entered into an agreement with the company that had built them to test them and potentially sell them. They ended up selling them to a company called Orbital Sciences which is using them in its Antares launch vehicle, which is set for its maiden launch this Wednesday, April 17, finally, hopefully, fingers-crossed, knock on wood, throw salt over the shoulder, breaking the curse of the NK-33*.

I should mention that in addition to the engines on the Antares being supplied from Russia, the first stage (tanks, etc.) are supplied from Ukraine by a company called KB Yuzhnoye.

*Many projects had been suggested for the NK-33, and some of them got quite far before failing, although none made it to launch. As a result, whenever someone came along with a new idea for a rocket using NK-33's, it was met with significant skepticism based on past experience.